dinsdag 24 januari 2012

Cinnamon 1.2 released

Cinnamon 1.2 is out!
All APIs and the desktop itself are now fully stable!
I hope you’ll enjoy the many new features, the desktop effect,
desktop layouts, the new configuration tool, the applets, changes, bug
fixes and improvements that went into this release. This is a huge step
forward for Cinnamon.
We’ll follow up with documentation for artists and developers, and
with a website for users to download, rate and comment themes, applets
and extensions. For now, we hope you enjoy this new release as much as
we enjoyed working on it. Some of the new features were requested by
many people, others will come as a bit of a surprise. It’s a real
pleasure for us to finally unveil the very latest of our favorite
desktop and we look forward to receiving your feedback so we can improve
Cinnamon further with each and every release.

Desktop effects

We all remember Compiz, wobbly windows and the desktop cube… some
people loved it, others preferred a desktop with no animations. What was
good with Compiz and Metacity though is that people had a choice to get
exactly what they wanted. Cinnamon 1.2 is a first step towards
reintroducing desktop effects and the ability for the user to define
fancy animations or to turn effects OFF altogether.
This release features 2 new animation plugins:

Fade, which changes the opacity of windows

Scale, which changes their dimension

And 30 transition styles:

30
transitions, 2 animations and configurable durations means you can make
windows appear and disappear in a multitude of different ways

For each animation you can also define the duration, so it’s easy to give your desktop your own unique feel.

This is how you configure desktop effects in Cinnamon

Desktop layouts

Another popular feature users “used” to have, was the ability to
change the layout of their desktop. Some people liked their panel on
top, others liked it at the bottom, and some even liked to have two
panels for their desktop. In Cinnamon 1.2, we haven’t reached the stage
where each component is independent and can be moved anywhere you like,
but we added support for the most common desktop layouts:

Traditional layout (one panel at the bottom)

Flipped layout (one panel at the top)

Classic layout (one panel at the bottom and one panel at the top)

A traditional desktop layout

The "flipped" layout, with panel on top

A "classic" desktop layout, one panel on top, one at the bottom

Easier customization

This release introduces a new configuration tool called “Cinnamon Settings” and additional configuration options.
You can now switch themes, apply desktop effects, add applets and
extensions to your desktop and configure some of the settings of the
desktop.

There's already a few quality themes available for Cinnamon

Among other things you can now also define your own date format for
the calendar applet and panel launchers are now editable and you can
change their icon.

Applets

Cinnamon 1.2 comes with 5 new applets by default:

Accessibility

Recent documents

Removable drives

Trash

Display (XrandR monitor control)

Applets are probably the coolest new feature in Cinnamon, for both users and developers

Though they will eventually become something similar to what they were in Gnome 2, “Applets” are a new concept in Cinnamon 1.2.
To users they are optional parts of the desktop which come installed
by default as part of what Cinnamon is and which place themselves in the
panel, near the system tray.
To developers they’re a fantastic new addition. The extension system
developed by Gnome Shell is not adapted to developing applets:

Because extensions insert themselves in the desktop, they interact
with the Shell code itself and this potentially makes them incompatible
with future versions of the Shell.

Because extensions insert themselves in the desktop, they have to define their own location

Because extensions insert themselves and don’t rely on any proper
API, they can’t take advantage of a common behaviour and look and feel

In Cinnamon 1.2, applets are a particular type of extension. They’re
specifically designed for extensions which add content to the panel and
feature the following advantages:

They benefit from an Applet API and are trivial to write (as an
applet developer you only focus on the content of your applet,
everything else is done for you)

They’re consistent and feature the same common behaviours (a context
menu, consistent styles for the applet container, tooltips etc..)

They don’t depend on a particular version of Cinnamon

They don’t specify their location or whether they’re loaded or not.
In Cinnamon 1.2 they’re near the systray. In future releases the user
will be able to move them around.

Eventually, all panel components in Cinnamon will be “applets” and
they will be loaded the same way as “applets” written by other
developers.
Developers are encouraged to only write extensions for advanced
purposes and to use the Applet API instead for anything that adds
content to the panel(s).

Improved main menu

The main menu was significantly improved.
If you search for something, the categories now become inactive so
you don’t hover them by accident just to see your search results
disappear.
You can now also simply press enter after a search and the first item in the search results gets launched.
The menu definitions are now handled by Cinnamon itself and the “Administration” and “Preferences” categories are back!

Under the hood changes

Important changes were made to significantly improve Cinnamon under
the hood and these changes also mean we’re now going further away from
any kind of compatibility with Gnome Shell.

Cinnamon now uses its own window manager (Muffin forks and replaces Mutter in Cinnamon 1.2)

Cinnamon is no longer compatible with Gnome Shell themes. It is
possible however for a theme to define styles for both Gnome Shell and
Cinnamon and to be compatible with both desktops.

Newly open windows are focused by default (instead of appearing in
the back with an annoying “Your window is ready” notification)

Closing windows on an empty workspace no longer triggers the overview.

The overview was replaced by a desktop Scale plugin (similar to the
old Compiz Scale). In future release, this plugin will be associated
with CTRL+ALT+DOWN and a new Expo plugin will be mapped to CTRL+ALT+UP.

Bug fix galore (after this release, 130 issues were closed since the start of the project)